Today I logged in to my MSN and noticed that I had 35 unread messages. All of these were delivery failure notifications, save for a warning from Iain Peregrine saying I had been compromised. Does anyone know how to purge this spambot from my account?

I know that Hotmail has security issues that aren't always the fault of the user. Back in mid 2009 (I believe around July) lots of accounts randomly began sending out spam to contact lists and hotmail refused to say whether their servers were compromised. My account was one of those and the emails that were being sent out were for some sort of Chinese electronics crap. Then in October of that year it was revealed that thousands of accounts were compromised.

I just changed my password and deleted all of my contacts in order to ensure they didn't receive any more spam messages (the spam was only being sent to random people on my contacts list). I've never kept my contacts saved on hotmail since.

Thank you everyone for your help. I've changed my password and security information so hopefully that solves the problem. If anyone receives any more of these e-mails from me please post in reply to this topic.